Making in the Apocalypse: How I shipped a SaaS after Hurricane Maria

This is naturally a difficult story to tell.

This is naturally a difficult story to tell. It involves two very hard things
for me, the passing of Hurricane María and the shutdown of a previous startup.
But I’m wishing to tell my story, so others can learn and be inspired by it.

The calm

September 16, 2017. Caguas, Puerto Rico.

You would’ve thought it was a normal day, until you looked at the TV monitors
and noticed the panic that was going on.

The weather was eerily calm. I remember helping my Dad put on the storm windows,
still not understanding exactly the severity of the situation. My generation had
never experienced a hurricane before. I must admit, I was curious. I wanted to
understand what the panic was about. Everything looked normal.

I took my external HDD and began backing up Taleship’s files, SSH keys, and
more. The past few months had been excellent for Taleship. User growth was
steady, and I was in the process of creating Taleship for Education, which
promised to provide a source of revenue for the budding startup.

As my dad and I hit the freeway to get supplies and visit relatives, he said
something rather striking:

Take pictures of everything you see now. Tomorrow morning, everything will
be gone.

In the car, I laughed slightly. I didn’t take any pictures. I brushed it off as
an exaggeration, something nonsensical, irrational. I thought it wouldn’t be
“that bad”.

He was right.

The morning after

After a sleepless night and nerve-wracking morning, the winds finally slowed
down enough to be able to safely peek outside and assess the damages.

Everything was destroyed. Poles in the floor, debris everywhere.

Like straight out of a nightmare.

The first few weeks

The following first weeks were a textbook apocalypse. We rationed food, water,
and fuel. In this period of time, I never truly thought once about my products,
as I was trying to rationalize and accept what just happened, and cope with the
survival instinct kicking in.

After a while, I was able to power on my laptop for the first time. This is
where I began to think about my products again, as the initial shock and emotion
subsided, and internet access started to become sporadically available utilizing
my phone’s hotspot.

I immediately released a statement on Taleship’s blog explaining the situation
and what measures I would take from this point forward, but internally, I had no
idea what to do.

Internet access was slow, I only had a budget laptop to develop on, and my
emotional state wasn’t helping.

However, I realized it all depended on me.** **I picked myself up, and decided
to do a simple thing: just ship. At night, when there was nothing left to do, I
picked up my charged laptop and built Taleship 2.0 in pitch darkness until its
battery died.

I took these difficult moments to better myself and my startup.

Because I only had two options; to wallow in it, or to get the most out of a bad
situation. I picked the latter, and you should too.

What I learned

Don’t wallow in the face of a bad situation. Positivity, always.

The business aspect

I utilized this time to reflect on the future of my startup, and plan out
exactly how it would recover from this devastating blow. With most if not all
local schools operating with diesel power, who would invest or buy any service
from my SaaS?

I had proposals ready, but who would accept them?

This mindset was the biggest hurdle. I continued developing the software, but I
had no idea where I was taking it.

To be completely honest, I didn’t recover from this one. Taleship shut down due
to lack of motivation and dwindling interest from the education sector after the
hurricane.

However, I did learn some lessons from this. I kept my network close and posted
on the startup’s situation, and their support greatly helped me.

As an extra note, I was aware that several coworking spaces were beginning to
open and were offering free space with high-speed internet for startups. If in
an emergency situation, try to find places to relocate your startup — there’s
always small spots with internet access that open up to take visitors.

What I learned

Keep your network close, and assess your options. Begin working on a recovery
plan as soon as possible. And, as stated before, don’t let the negativity
consume you. It will be the death of your startup.

The emotional aspect

There’s a moment I won’t ever forget. One that marked me forever.

I remember turning on the radio with my family nearby, while the winds were
still raging outside. It was morning.

Only one radio station was still transmitting. We tuned in, and started
listening to the calls they were taking in.

This experience marked me — and, in a way, our country, as a whole.

One call I especially remember was someone narrating how their house was
flooding completely and they needed help stat. This one hit me hard — imagine
your home flooding. Everything you own. And feeling completely helpless about
it.

Then the other calls were mostly a stream of international callers checking in,
trying to contact their family members.

It was truly a hard listen. One of the hardest of my life. I’m having a hard
time even writing this.

All in all, you’ll be bombarded with experiences like this, because it’s
reality. It’s happening in your country. Your people are suffering this. So
naturally, it won’t help your emotions very much!

At first you may feel fine. You’ll be fine until reality kicks in. The first
week or so, I felt alright, mostly because I had not realized the scale yet. It
will take time to rationalize what’s going on.

Here’s a few tips to help you continue on.

Sergio’s Hurricane Emotional Checklist

Take a break. Don’t continue with the grind mentality. With the recovery
work you’ll be involved in ( finding gas, etc), you’ll have enough on your
plate. Put yourself first in this time.

Engage in recovery work. Don’t stay at home. It’ll make you more depressed —
go out there, join citizens and recovery workers picking up debris and help them
out! It’s great because it helps the country recover and keeps you from
overthinking things.

Listen to music and read books. I’ll go more in-depth about this later,
you’ll need it.

Keep a positive outlook. I know it’s hard to stay positive after things of
this scale happen, but try! It’s up to you whether you let it destroy you or use
it as a learning experience.

The development aspect

Developing after the hurricane was difficult, but possible.

The biggest hurdle I encountered was slow, sporadic internet access. Due to
the lack of power, cable provider internet was not an option. The only way of
accessing the web was through my phone’s hotspot, and signal was spotty at best,
even a month after day zero.

Sergio’s Hurricane Preparation Checklist:

Documentation: I downloaded docs using Zeal, the Linux equivalent for
DashDocs.

You won’t have StackOverflow, but you will have piles of documentation to search
through. I definitely came out a better developer after this hurricane.

External assets

This one is also absolutelyurgent.

When turning on my development server to code, the first problem I faced was
that Taleship relied on a lot of external assets.

These were not stored or cached in my laptop, and made loading the app
*extremely slow. *After an hour or so, I managed to download all failing assets,
but it was still a pain.

Don’t rely too much on CDNs. It breaks in the apocalypse.

Music

This saved my BUTT!

Always keep a little bit of music saved somewhere. Spotify and Apple Music
didn’t work, but I had a few albums saved on my external drive.

Don’t even think of downloading some music at the time — I tried that, and quit
when I realized a 2MB song would take about 5–8 minutes to download.

A little Radiohead at the end of the day really helps keep the apocalypse stress
away. And don’t forget some Lady Gaga when you start picking up debris — it’s
much less of a chore when you’re singing Bad Romance.

What I learned

Keep copies of everything you frequently access. Documentation and external
assets are a must, too.

Almost a year later

Well, it’s been quite a while since the hurricane struck.

I’m totally fine now. I like to think I came out a better human from this whole
ordeal. I didn’t go to school for a month or so, and when I wasn’t doing
recovery chores, I was reading, coding, and in general bettering myself. On
another note, Taleship didn’t work out, but I learned quite a lot from it.

Nowadays, I’m shipping a product called Makerlog, a
productivity tool for makers. You should check it out, by the way.

Final thoughts

The island is still recovering from the hurricane’s ruthless strike, but life is
mostly back to normal. Our resilience and unity got us through this mess, and in
a sense, made us all better people.

I still remember what I felt when I saw everyone together clearing roads and
picking up debris.

I felt hope. Hope that in the face of adversity, we would rise.

And we did.

Thanks for reading!

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